"The Bourne Identity"

The moral dilemma that "The Bourne Identity" presents emerges when the hero discovers his true identity as a CIA assassin. Part of an elite, rogue team of killers stationed in cities around the world, Bourne is marked for death by the agency after failing in his mission to assassinate a former African dictator. The stirrings of Bourne's conscience don't resonate as deep as they seem intended to, but they aren't easily sloughed off, either. With a PG-13 rating, "The Bourne Identity" isn't particularly explicit, though the violence is nasty. The nastiness is the point. If the violence doesn't have the visceral shock or moral complications of the violence in a De Palma or a Peckinpah film, neither is it put on the screen to thrill us. Without lingering sadistically on anything, Liman does something that's become rare in commercial movies: He associates violence with pain. When a man falls down a flight of stairs we see his head bumping the steps. When a cop flips off his motorcycle during a chase, we see him sliding along the pavement.

You don't cheer Bourne dispatching the CIA hit men sent after him. Damon makes you feel Bourne's revulsion at what he has to do. And Potente's presence reinforces that revulsion. She's seeing death and killing up close for the first time, and it rattles her. (After her first violent encounter, she throws up. That bit of puke is a sign of the movie's integrity.) The screenwriters don't provide the reasons the CIA wanted that African politician dead. In the movie's scheme, whatever those reasons are, they pale beside the cold, premeditated taking of human life.

The story slows down whenever the action switches to Langley, where Bourne's CIA handler (Chris Cooper, proving you should never trust a man who wears short-sleeved dress shirts) and his wonks try to ferret out their killer on the loose. But Liman uses the insulation of their airless techno bunker, with its computers and phone lines, as an effective contrast to the gorgeous, wintry Paris and Prague (standing in for Zurich) through which Damon and Potente skitter. Shot by Oliver Wood, the movie imparts an Old World chill that emphasizes the warmth of the two young leads.

This may be Damon's bid to become a viable action star. Likable as he is, there's still something a trifle blocked about him, a touch of callowness that keeps Bourne's moral predicament from having the urgency it should. Which is not to say he's not sympathetic, just that he seems more kid than hardened pro. But you only have to contrast this performance with the generalized, directionless intensity Tom Cruise brings to his action roles to appreciate that Damon has chosen to play a human being instead of an action figure. His finest moments are near the beginning, when the still-amnesiac Bourne is rousted by two cops while sleeping on a Zurich park bench. He registers surprise when he finds he's able to answer them in German and there's a hair-trigger pause in the seconds before he realizes he has the fighting skills to disarm them that makes the swiftness of his subsequent action both funny and startling.

Liman serves the supporting actors less well than his leads. He wastes Brian Cox, grim and official as a CIA muck-a-muck, and Julia Stiles, whose role consists almost entirely of sitting in a room in Paris monitoring computers and answering phones. The most preternaturally composed young actress in the movies, Stiles makes you believe she has the sand and the steady nerves for undercover work. But the one shot of her out of her office, at a secret nighttime meeting on a Paris street, makes you long for what she could have done. In her beret and overcoat she looks as if she's stepped out of some wartime espionage romance. (If they ever get around to filming any of Alan Furst's World War II-era spy novels, they could do worse than to look at that shot of Stiles.)

As one of the assassins sent after Bourne, Clive Owen is very nearly similarly wasted, though his eventual encounter with Damon makes you understand exactly why he took this small role. Owen effortlessly captures what the movie strains to convey: a spy's moral queasiness with his work. It's one of those small, brilliantly acted moments that linger in the memory.

I hope that the qualified praise I've given "The Bourne Identity" doesn't make me sound ungrateful for the pleasure it gave me. Liman manages a certain tough-mindedness here without giving in to cynicism or hopelessness. (The movie's sunny final scene feels earned.) And he shows an awareness of craft and narrative cohesion that makes me hope he continues to develop those qualities, which mainstream Hollywood filmmaking so desperately needs. The old question of how you make spy movies or write spy thrillers after the end of the Cold War has now been replaced by the question of how you make them after Sept. 11. "The Bourne Identity" invokes a different kind of nostalgia: the memory of what it's like to go to a Hollywood movie and be treated with decency.

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